We Analyzed 150 UAE Ecommerce Sites For User Behavior & Found This

We reviewed over 150 UAE E-commerce businesses to learn about visitor experience and behaviour.

​

First, we gathered data points around time on site, number of pages visited, bounce rates and more for each of the websites.

Next, we compared the data sets to get an idea of the kind of metrics that we are seeing across E-commerce in UAE. 

With the help of our Data and AI partner HONE we uncovered some seriously interesting insights.

Time on site or average visit duration refers to the total time spent by a visitor on a website (not a web page).

In your Google Analytics account this is also known as Session duration.

It's calculated by taking the total time duration of all sessions divided by the number of sessions. 

Here are 6 suggestions to improve Time on Site:

​

• Understand your customer journey and desired outcomes in depth. Then create specific content for each stage of that journey.
• Ensure that your headlines and descriptions in search results promise exactly what the visitor will receive when they click to your ecommerce site
• Break up large chunks of text and keep the messaging around how the visitor can experience quick wins
• Add Calls To Action to direct visitors on what they must do next
• Use video to increase visitor engagement and dwell time
• Optimize website speed including image compression, web caching, Javacript and CSS minification.

Think about that for a moment.

Unless visitors somehow land on the checkout page of the product they are interested in, this means that:

For every 100 site visitors 22 are GUARANTEED not to buy.

This is a massive loss especially considering the investment ecommerce brands push into paid campaigns, social campaigns, SEO and content.

In fact, a study by Ivesp showed that average ecommerce conversion rates globally was 2.86% in Q2 2018.

So losing 20%+ of visitors right out the gate won't help those conversion rates at all.

Here's how Google defines Ecommerce conversion rate:

And there are several factors that come into play for conversion rates including, among others, things like:

• Industry sector and market
• Type of products
• Traffic channels

But here's the thing.

Know how we said average ecommerce converison hovers around 2.8%?

Actually, ecommerce sites should aim higher.

Much higher.

A study by Wordstream found that where ecommerce brands really want to be is in the 11%+ conversion rate bracket.

1. Improve market segmentation and customer profiling: This can be done through surveying or interviewing a group of customers that purchased products. These efforts will reveal deeper commonalities in interests, desired outcomes and more that will reinforce targeting and messaging for ecommerce marketing campaigns.
2. Focus on quality traffic: This means digging into your analytics to determine which traffic channels produce the most conversions. In general, studies like this one from Episerver suggest that channels rank in the following order: Paid - Search - Referral - Email - Direct - Social - Display. But again, check your analytics and find the channels that result in the most conversions not the one bringing in the most traffic.
3. Upgrade the mobile shopping experience: Companies with optimized mobile sites triple their chances of hitting conversion rates above 5%.
4. Promote the products that generate the highest conversions with the highest margins.
5. Use heat mapping tools: such as Hotjar to determine how visitors are interacting with the site and uncover reasons why they visit only 1 page.
6. Implement bolder A/B Tests: It's not about testing different color buttons. Rather test things like long form messaging vs short form, different offers or a the same message with different audiences.

It's unlikely that site visitors jump straight to the checkout page.

Especially first time visitors.

But if they do land on the site, assuming that the right audience was targeted, it suggests they arrived looking for a specific outcome.

And it is the job of the ecommerce business to guide customers to achieve that outcome and eventually to a transaction.

This is where both the marketing and sales funnels come in to play.

Bounce rates are a grey area.

Often people think a bounce is simply when a visitor lands on a page and leaves.

Which could be the result of any of the following scenarios:

• Clicking back to the search results
• Closing the browser
• Typing a new url in the address bar
• Timing out the session

I came - I saw - I left.

That's partly true.

But here's how Google defines a bounce.

Such high bounce rates present a huge problem for ecommerce sites.

Or huge opportunity depending on how you look at things.

Precisely because it is well above the acceptable industry average.

In fact: 

A study by CustomMediaLabs and adopted by ConversionXL revealed that average Ecommerce bounce rates are in the 20 - 45% region.

So what can ecommerce businesses do about it?

For starters:

Track events in Google Analytics rather than just Page views.

This means creating events within your Analytics account to give a more realistic impression of user interaction on the site. 

Yes it requires more effort.

But for ecommerce brands that want a deeper look at user interaction this is a must.

Second:

Optimize page speed.

In general, a 3 second load time is the maximum accepted for any ecommerce landing page.

Third:

Use a heatmap tool.

This is especially important in answering questions like whether visitors are viewing full product pages or should pages be re-designed or even revising product spec descriptions.

Fourth and probably most important:

Segmenting website traffic.

This means sending traffic from different sources to different landing pages for better evaluation of bounce rates.  

Traffic can be segmented according to:

What does this mean?

It means that 83% of the time, no matter what your funnel activation strategy is, it should involve a mobile first approach.

This is important because majority of sites are still not adequately optimized for mobile.

Furthermore:

This finding is directly in line with Google's recent announcement that they are switching to mobile-first indexing by September 2020.

The following are the optimizations to verify for the mobile first roll-out.

And they are especially important following new website launches or redesign.

1. Ensure that the Googlebot crawler can access mobile pages i.e. check any robots.txt and noindex tags for mobile pages
2. Structured data should be the same for mobile and desktop versions of the site. For ecommerce stores prioritize checking structured data for [breadcrumbs], [product] and tags
3. Content and headings should be the same on mobile and desktop versions. Often mobile pages have reduced content compared to desktop. Following the roll-out such difference will lead to traffic loss as Google can't get enough information from the page as before
4.  Check visual and video content for both site versions. This means using supported formats, the same alt descriptions, quality, no urls changes with each load, content positioning and so on.

For additional improvements, check out Google's recommendations here.

It is technical but there's no 2 ways about it.

Get your SEO to confirm that the site is ready for the shift to mobile first indexing and avoid any unwanted ranking cliff-drops.

There's no shortage of data showing that mobile traffic is overtaking desktop.

Like this report from Bain & Company with Google where they found that in the UAE and KSA, the mobile share of shopping related queries has reached 70%. And in KSA, UAE and Egypt 55% of shoppers prefer to use smartphones to shop online.

According to our results, whether the bounce rate was high at 50%+ or low at less than 30% the number of bounces attributed to a mobile device were consistently greater than desktop.

​

Again, this aligns with existing studies that show mobile bounce rates are generally higher than desktop.

Quick explanations include:

1. Mobile traffic to ecommerce sites is larger than desktop so we can expect more bounces attributed to mobile
2. Poor connectivity
3. The "on-the-go" nature of mobile use and need for quick results
4. Easy interruption
5. Reduced likelihood to spend longer time on small screens

That being said, a report by Comscore on the Hierarchy of mobile needs, shed some light on deeper underlying issues.

​

Here are the pain points for ecommerce sites to address to reassure their visitors:

1. Security concerns
2. Cannot see the product clearly
3. Difficult navigation
4. Inconvenience when entering details
5. Inability to browse and compare multiple screens
6. Lack of trust around safety of credit card information storage and digital footprint